24 Hours with ScanSnap S1500

[AndyC 3]

Well, after much thought, I bit the bullet and my ScanSnap s1500 arrived yesterday evening. Just as a part time thing I've scanned a pile of paper almost a foot thick. I'm really pleased with the speed, quality of scans, and integration with Evernote.

I'm also throwing a copy of everything to a local NAS drive to have a second copy, and anything confidential is only going to a local folder in Evernote (I can live without my bank statements on my phone as well!!) I've taken a calculated risk with a couple of documents I want to have off-line - most notably my home insurance policy details!!

The only thing it's barfed on is a test of cutting the spine off a magazine and scanning it - I think because it wasn't very straight. Old magazines might need a better approach (or a sharper knife and a straight edge). I don't think my 1Gb allowance is going to hold up very long at this rate.

A satisfied customer!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Glad to hear!

Remember, you can always add an extra 1GB each month above and beyond the regular premium amount. Also, when it comes to books and magazines, I find a guillotine paper cutter to be invaluable. I am not promoting this site, but they have some photographs http://www.mybinding.com/.sc/ms/cat/Paper%20Handling--Guillotine%20Cutters

[Owyn 457]

And, items in a desktop Local notebook don't count against your upload quota.

[AndyC 3]

I have cheated on a few documents - I've had a handful of thick, or odd-shaped product manuals. A bit of googling has found the manual available for download, so I've downloaded that instead of trying to figure out how to get the original into the scanner. For the number of magazines I think I can get away with a sharp knife and straight edge rather than spending a lot of money on guillotine that can take 150 pages at a time. The recycle pile is now well over a foot high, and the "to shred" pile is catching up as I get into a box full of pension paperwork.

Some stuff is turning up that genuinely can be dropped, but I'm not caring too much about those.

As a guideline for anyone else going down this road, that's about 450Mb of data uploaded so far. I think I'm coming up on a "new month" in a week or so, so should be able to keep going for a while.

So far it hasn't really shown up as extra space in the room, but that's largely because the untidy pile of "unscannables" and "do not destroy" needs to be put in a new home - rather more tidily! I keep a lot of stuff in Really Useful Boxes and their 9 litre size box holds two reams of A4/letter size paper quite neatly. My target is for the "retain" pile to fit into one box, from about 8-10 boxes, plus 8-10 ring binders.

The only exception is two smaller boxes for original old photos, and original family documents, that will be scanned and restored to the box - and my mother can get the photos back when I'm done with those.

[AndyC 3]

Another tip I've discovered is to put all the "single sheet" documents in a separate pile, then switch to scanning each page as a separate PDF to get those in quickly.

I've left pretty much all scan settings as default/auto and am happy with the results. Much better than some scanned documents at work I have to use that aren't properly in focus.

[West1210 2]

So excited to become a premium member of Evernote and get all my papers out of the way. As a college student I've been doing a "quick scan" by taking pictures with my 8MP camera phone and posting them along with summaries of the documents...I've found my camera is good enough that I can make out fine print and zoom in when needed. For now it's not the most efficient way of "scanning" but it's definitely doing the trick so far. An actual scanner will be something I purchase soon